I may or may not be able to keep this up. Firstly, I’m not sure anyone reads this, and second, time is kind of precious. I’m swamped!

But if I do I will try and focus as much or more on my Orthodox Faith as on politics and the world. Without God, cries for sanity in the world are a waste of time. Thus any efforts I have time for should be dedicated to that end.

Father Stephen is always profound. He is one of those truly gifted by God with the ability to communicate and teach..

We live in the modern world – a fact for which we have no antidote. It is the moment in history that is ours. Christians before us have lived in the Roman world, various pagan worlds, the Byzantine world, the world of "Holy Russia," but we are tasked by Divine Providence to live as Orthodox Christians in the modern world. It is a setting that has its own unique challenges and its own unique temptations. For Orthodox Christians who live in countri … Read More

Just out of curiosity I thought I would stop by and say hi. Does anyone now or did anyone in the past actually care for this blog? I’ve gotten no complaints that I stopped, and never had much interaction before that, so…

The KGB just changed it’s name, but that’s it. They’re still there. You know what happened with the Soviet Union? Only one thing – those in control realized that there was a better way to do it. Nobody overthrew anything. Ronald Reagan finished wearing them down, but they had long since realized their way was a loser. They’re just trying something new.

NEW YORK (WABC) — The Justice Department says 10 Russian intelligence officers have been arrested for allegedly serving as illegal agents of the Russian government in the United States.

Five of the 10 people arrested are from New York and New Jersey.

The Department of Justice says Richard and “Cynthia Murphy were arrested Sunday by FBI agents at their residence in Montclair, N.J., and are expected to appear in federal court in Manhattan today.

Vicky Pelaez and the a defendant known as Juan Lazaro were arrested Sunday at their residence in Yonkers, N.Y., and are expected to appear in federal court in Manhattan today. Anna Chapman was arrested in Manhattan yesterday and is expected to appear in federal court in Manhattan today.

Filed under – DUH! Of course it’s a right you idiots. You know, I would imagine if the Constitution was required reading in this country people might not have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to figure this out. I mean really, I knew it in elementary school the first time they went over it with me.

The Supreme Court ruled for the first time Monday that the Second Amendment provides all Americans a fundamental right to bear arms, a long-sought victory for gun rights advocates who have chafed at federal, state and local efforts to restrict gun ownership.

The court was considering a restrictive handgun law in Chicago and one of its suburbs that was similar to the District law that it ruled against in 2008. The 5 to 4 decision does not strike any other gun control measures currently in place, but it provides a legal basis for challenges across the country where gun owners think that government has been too restrictive.

“It is clear that the Framers . . . counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the conservatives on the court.

Whatever. It’s still just stupid. And the people there seem incapable of really getting their heads around the problem. Reality bites, especially when you are incapable of actually seeing it.

Boasting a population that is 97% Hispanic, more than half foreign born, and 40% illegal, the Los Angeles County, Calif., incorporated city of Maywood has achieved the Reconquista goal. It is now as lawless and chaotic as any place in Mexico. Maywood is a warning to every city and town in America.

The Maywood City Council announced this week that after years of radical policies, corruption and scandal, the city was broke and all city employees would be laid off and essential city services contracted out to neighboring cities or to L.A. County government.

How did this happen? Until recently, Maywood was the model for “brown power” politics.

Maywood was the first California city with an elected Hispanic City Council, one of the first “sanctuary” cities for illegal aliens, the first city to pass a resolution calling for a boycott of Arizona after that state passed a law to enforce federal immigration laws, the first California city to order its police department not to enforce state laws requiring drivers to have licenses to drive, the first American city to call on Congress to grant amnesty to all illegals.

Sure, we’ll hire more people and send in the Guard and stuff. And by that he means hire more people but cut back on the total numbers of hours worked, which cancels out the effect of the new people, and say he will send in the Guard without actually doing it. But hey, it’s on paper and he can always say he wanted to but there was some evil plan to prevent him.

The blatant nature of this scam they are running – and I don’t just mean immigration – is truly frightening.

The U.S. Border Patrol has quietly reduced its current force of available agents along the U.S.-Mexico border by cutting the overtime hours they can work even as the Obama administration is asking Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars to hire 1,000 new agents, and Congress and the public are clamoring for beefed-up border security.

Several rank-and-file and senior agents told The Washington Times that a new overtime directive issued at the agency’s Washington headquarters will limit their ability to get their jobs done, reduce coverage during peak smuggling periods and allow more criminals to avoid apprehension.

“By lowering the statutory overtime cap nearly 15 percent through the current administrative restrictions, top-level managers in the Border Patrol are depriving Americans of desperately needed coverage along the border at a time of national crisis,” said T.J. Bonner, a veteran agent who heads the National Border Patrol Council, which represents all 15,000 of the agency’s nonsupervisory agents.

Because of the nature of the job, most Border Patrol agents average at least two hours overtime a day and the agency, as part of its ongoing recruitment effort, has promised what it called an “excellent opportunity for overtime pay.” The overtime cutback comes at a time that violence against the agents, according to Department of Homeland Security records, is up 31 percent this fiscal year.

The highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law spoke out on Barack Obama saying, “Professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings.”
Doug Ross reported this and more:

I spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back, and he did not have many nice things to say about “Barry.” Obama applied for a position as an adjunct and wasn’t even considered. A few weeks later the law school got a phone call from the Board of Trustees telling them to find him an office, put him on the payroll, and give him a class to teach. The Board told him he didn’t have to be a member of the faculty, but they needed to give him a temporary position. He was never a professor and was hardly an adjunct.

The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool. According to my professor friend, he had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building. He also doubted whether he was legitimately an editor on the Harvard Law Review, because if he was, he would be the first and only editor of an Ivy League law review to never be published while in school (publication is or was a requirement).

This photo of Barack Obama teaching in Chicago was posted in February 2008 at PrestoPundit. In this class Barack Obama was teaching his students the principles of Saul Alinsky.

I was taken aback by the way the audience just sits there, as if expressing support for a second Holocaust is just another opinion, and as worthy of consideration as, say, a proposal to build a new student housing complex.

So I wonder. Is there an emerging standard of tolerance for Hitler?

Or is there some sort of Hitler double standard?

The fact is, if any American of European descent publicly expresses approval of Hitler, riots erupt. At the very least, any comment supportive of Hitler or Nazi policies would be greeted with an instant chorus of boos.

Yet when a Muslim does the same thing, we are supposed to be understanding and tolerant of other cultures.

In this context, it’s impossible for me to overlook a very ugly phenomenon that is usually overlooked (possibly suppressed) in the MSM. I refer to an undisguised fondness for Hitler among too many Islamists and their supporters. In the Mideast (and in Turkey), Mein Kampf is a best seller, and babies are named for Hitler.

I think that’s appalling, and I don’t understand why the phenomenon isn’t roundly condemned by all Americans who believe in basic standards of civilization. Yet instead of it being roundly condemned, those who roundly condemn it find themselves roundly condemned — for “hate speech”! And the sites which document pro-Hitler hate by Muslim extremists are called “hate sites.” That in itself is outrageous.

This is not to say that there aren’t crackpot, Hitler-loving Americans of European descent, only that there is a vastly different standard applied to them. When an American couple named their baby for Hitler, the baby was taken away. I’m not saying their baby should have been taken away, but I very much doubt the same thing would have happened had the parents been Muslims.

This Hitler double standard is dangerous and I don’t like it. Adolf Hitler — a man who stands out in human history as truly epitomizing evil — is being treated as if he were an oppressed Muslim in need of tolerance.

To call it a slippery slope would be understatement.

I’m worried that in the name of “tolerance,” people are losing their minds.

All about politics – they just want to find a way to demonize and distance themselves from oil.

The panel appointed by President Barack Obama to investigate the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is short on technical expertise but long on talking publicly about “America’s addiction to oil.” One member has blogged about it regularly.

Only one of the seven commissioners, the dean of Harvard’s engineering and applied sciences school, has a prominent engineering background — but it’s in optics and physics. Another is an environmental scientist with expertise in coastal areas and the after-effects of oil spills. Both are praised by other scientists.

The five other commissioners are experts in policy and management.

The White House said the commission will focus on the government’s “too cozy” relationship with the oil industry. A presidential spokesman said panel members will “consult the best minds and subject matter experts” as they do their work.

The commission has yet to meet, yet some panel members had made their views known

Environmental activist Frances Beinecke on May 27 blogged: “We can blame BP for the disaster and we should. We can blame lack of adequate government oversight for the disaster and we should. But in the end, we also must place the blame where it originated: America’s addiction to oil.”

And on June 3, May 27, May 22, May 18, May 4, she called for bans on drilling offshore and the Arctic.

“Even as questions persist, there is one thing I know for certain: the Gulf oil spill isn’t just an accident. It’s the result of a failed energy policy,” Beinecke wrote on May 20.

Two other commissioners also have gone public to urge bans on drilling.

In the original photograph the war leader has his cigar gripped firmly in the corner of his mouth.

But in the other image – currently greeting visitors to a London museum – his favourite smoke has been digitally extinguished.
Uniform, victory salute and cigar: Winston Churchill in the 1940s and now without his trademark smoke

It seems the man who steered Britain through the most dangerous period of its recent history may have fallen victim to the modern curse of political correctness.

Barack Obama doesn’t do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill.

He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian “I feel your pain,” a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting.

It wasn’t until the end of the speech — the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda — that Obama warmed to his task.

Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.

How? By creating a glorious, new, clean green economy.

And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around.

With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.

But is this not what we’ve been trying to do for decades with ethanol, which remains a monumental boondoggle, economically unviable and environmentally damaging to boot?

As with yesterday’s panacea, synfuels, into which Jimmy Carter poured billions.

Notice that Obama no longer talks about Spain, which until recently he repeatedly cited for its visionary subsidies of a blossoming new clean energy industry.

That’s because Spain, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is pledged to reverse its disastrously bloated public spending, including radical cuts in subsidies to its uneconomical photovoltaic industry.

There’s a reason petroleum is such a durable fuel. It’s not, as Obama fatuously suggested, because of oil company lobbying but because it is very portable, energy dense and easy to use.

But this doesn’t stop Obama from thinking that he can mandate into being a superior substitute. His argument: Well, if we can put a man on the moon, why not this?

Aside from the irony that this most tiresome of cliches comes from a president who is canceling our program to return to the moon, it is utterly meaningless.

The wars on cancer and on poverty have been similarly sold. They remain unwon. Why? Because we knew how to land on the moon. We had the physics to do it.

Cancer cells, on the other hand, are far more complex than the Newtonian equations that govern a moon landing. Equally daunting are the laws of social interaction — even assuming there are any — that sustain a culture of poverty.

Similarly, we don’t know how to make renewables that match the efficiency of fossil fuels. In the interim, it is Obama and his Democratic allies who, as they dream of such scientific leaps, are unwilling to use existing technologies to reduce our dependence on foreign (i.e., imported) and risky (i.e., deep-water) sources of oil — twin dependencies that Obama decried in Tuesday’s speech.

“Part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean,” said Obama, is “because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.”

Running out of places on land? What about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the less-known National Petroleum Reserve — 23 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope, near the existing pipeline and designated nearly a century ago for petroleum development — that have been shut down by the federal government?

Running out of shallow water sources? How about the Pacific Ocean, a not inconsiderable body of water, and its vast U.S. coastline? That’s been off-limits to new drilling for three decades.

We haven’t run out of safer and more easily accessible sources of oil. We’ve been run off them by environmentalists. They prefer to dream green instead.

Obama is dreamer in chief: He wants to take us to this green future “even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet precisely know how we’re going to get there.”

Here’s the offer: Tax carbon, spend trillions and put government in control of the energy economy — and he will take you he knows not where, by way of a road he knows not which.

That’s why Tuesday’s speech was received with such consternation. It was so untethered from reality.

The Gulf is gushing, and the president is talking mystery roads to unknown destinations.

That passes for vision, and vision is Obama’s thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.

LONDON – Sex education should be taught to children from the age of five to give them the skills and confidence to delay sexual intimacy until they are ready, a British health watchdog said on Thursday.

Inadequate sex education at a young age is widely seen as contributing to Britain’s steep rate of teenage conception, still amongst the highest in Europe despite a 13 percent fall over the past decade.

The latest guidance from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is in draft form and will not be compulsory, but the agency said it expected local authorities and others to follow it.

Our perennial national debate over how to interpret the Constitution will soon be renewed, as the Senate considers the Supreme Court nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan.

In fact, former Justice David Souter set the discussion in motion last month in a Harvard commencement address— arguing that seeking to resolve difficult constitutional questions based on an honest effort to construe that document’s words (whether broadly or narrowly) “has only a tenuous connection to reality” and leads to bad decisions.

Souter’s candor is commendable but also genuinely troubling — the practical equivalent of a retired cardinal announcing that religion is an opiate for the masses. Even judges who quietly believe that the Constitution is an irredeemably reactionary document, which they must pull and push into the 21st century, are not generally so bold, preferring instead to cloak their innovations with references to the Constitution’s text.

Souter, however, argues that the Constitution is too full of ambiguous language and competing imperatives to sustain a textual approach to its interpretation. Like the people it serves — who throughout their history have demanded security and liberty, liberty and equality — the Constitution tries to have it both ways and is too often irreconcilable.

It is, therefore, the courts (and the Supreme Court especially), that Souter believes must “decide which of our approved desires has the better claim,” and this cannot be done simply by reading the Constitution’s words. Put differently, we all must trust in the judges to find our way through the morass, to make the right choices between competing constitutional imperatives, and we cannot accuse them of making up the law when they make choices we do not like. It is their job, not ours.
When judges rule

It would be difficult to articulate a decision-making model more antithetical to American democracy and the Constitution’s own design. It is often said — by the Supreme Court among others — that we have a “government of laws and not of men.” Judges are people, not the living embodiment of the law. When a judge makes the choices Souter suggests, without regard to the Constitution’s words and their original meaning, it is the judges who rule and not the law.

And yes, if you read that they waited between 3 months to 2 years to report this you are reading correctly. Wow. Glad they’re on the lookout for possible security situations in the old homeland right? Gotta move fast and all…

U.S. Air Force

FILE: Air traffic controllers from the 37th Operations Support Squadron prepare to navigate F-16 Falcons down the runway on Lackland Air Force Base.

A nationwide alert has been issued for 17 members of the Afghan military who have gone AWOL from a Texas Air Force base where foreign military officers who are training to become pilots are taught English, FoxNews.com has learned.

The Afghan officers and enlisted men have security badges that give them access to secure U.S. defense installations, according to the lookout bulletin, “Afghan Military Deserters in CONUS [Continental U.S.],” issued by Naval Criminal Investigative Service in Dallas, and obtained by FoxNews.com.

The Afghans were attending the Defense Language Institute at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. The DLI program teaches English to military pilot candidates and other air force prospects from foreign countries allied with the U.S.

“I can confirm that 17 have gone missing from the Defense Language Institute,” said Gary Emery, Chief of Public Affairs, 37th Training Wing, at Lackland AFB. “They disappeared over the course of the last two years, and none in the last three months.”

Each Afghan was issued a Department of Defense Common Access Card, an identification card used to gain access to secure military installations, with which they “could attempt to enter DOD installations,” according to the bulletin. Base security officers were encouraged to disseminate the bulletin to their personnel.

“The visas issued to these personnel have been revoked, or are in the process of being revoked. Lookouts have been placed in TECS,” it reads.